Castle Rock Season 1, led by Andre Holland and Bill Skarsgård as, perhaps, two versions of the same character, was nothing if not mysterious. Skarsgård’s enigmatic expressions alone were enough to keep audiences guessing—never mind the fact that the season’s showstopper, Episode 7, hopped, skipped, and jumped through time with abandon. But if audiences expected show-runners Sam Shaw and Dustin Thomason to tie all these interlocking mysteries up with a neat bow before rolling on to the next chapter in Castle Rock’s history, well, they’re in for some disappointment. The finale ends with as many questions as ever, but that, the show-runners say, was their intention.

Though there’s a possibility that future seasons will include more concrete explanations and returning Season 1 characters, Shaw and Thomason gave Vanity Fair what answers they could, for now, about that engrossing, uncomfortable, and perplexing finale.

What are we to make of the monstrous flash of the Kid in the episode’s final minutes? Before Castle Rock premiered, Bill Skarsgård was already giving Stephen King fans some clues to chew on when he said that his mysterious role, the Kid, was both an original character and one who had a “mythological connection” to the larger King universe. In Episode 9, the Kid claims to be an alternate-reality version of Andre Holland’s Henry Deaver. But in the finale, we see a flash of something terrifying and monstrous on his face. What was that, anyway?! Who is this guy? Looks like you’ll have to keep guessing.

“This may frustrate some people, but I think for us, we really want people to interpret that moment as they will,” Thomason said, “and we’re not gonna comment a lot on that moment.” O.K., but will we find out the truth eventually? Say, in Season 2? “Neither one of us will say too much about exactly in what ways some of those questions are gonna return,” Thomason added. “Part of the fun of the ride is not knowing exactly what's around the next corner.” More on Season 2 in a bit.

All right, fine. But does that mean all of Episode 9 was a lie?Is the Kid Henry Deaver at all? Were we as duped as Molly (Melanie Lynskey) to think he might be? Shaw points out that the last line of Episode 9 is Skarsgård’s character asking Molly, “You believe me, don’t you?” That question alone should have put audiences on high alert to be skeptical of the Kid’s story before we even got to the finale.

“It’s a pretty seductive story,” Shaw said of the yarn the Kid weaves in Episode 9. “It does helpfully answer a whole lot of questions that have been posed, and provide a pretty good Rosetta Stone to understanding some inexplicable events that have taken place over the previous eight hours of story.” Thomason added: “From a really early point, we knew that the architecture of the season would involve arriving at a moment when Bill’s character presents the audience with a fairly comprehensive and satisfying explanation, and that the final act of the story hinges on the question of whether Henry and the audience believe the story they’ve been told.”

And what of that final, creepy smile? To further underline the ambiguity of the season, the finale wraps up near where it began, with Skarsgård’s “Kid” back behind bars. This time, his keeper is Holland’s Henry Deaver. It’s as much of a tragic life sentence for Henry as it is for the Kid, but one he’s hopefully up for. We see the Kid—who has kept his expressions fairly neutral all season—flash the camera a brief but rather unnerving smile as the episode cuts to black. (The finale actually ends with Jane Levy’s Jackie Torrance typing away, mid-credits, at her keyboard and hinting at a trip out to The Shining’s Overlook Hotel.)

But what does the Kid’s smile mean? Skarsgård doesn’t go full Pennywise here, but it’s close. The show-runners gave me a long non-answer to this question that they laughingly admitted was essentially a filibuster. But here’s the most useful nugget. Thomason said: “What we loved about what Bill brought to the role throughout the entire season was his extreme unknowability. The architecture of the story itself is built for that. You’re watching a guy who on the surface appears to be recovering memory of who he is and what he is. That gradual process of watching Bill coming out of his shell over the course of the season, and ultimately coming to a place where he can tell that entire narrative, is one of the most interesting and exciting things to watch. When you get to the final moments with Andre and Bill down in the tank, there are obviously a lot of questions at the heart of it. What does Henry believe? What are we supposed to believe?”

In order to understand the Kid’s state of mind, Thomason suggests we pay closer attention to a moment at the beginning of the episode where Warden Lacy (Terry O’Quinn) points a gun at the cage where he’s been keeping this ageless creature he calls the devil. Skarsgård as the Kid leans into the bars wanting to be shot. “Whoever I was before,” Thomason said, speaking for the Kid in that moment, “this is what I’ve become.” That idea is revisited both in Holland’s end-of-episode voice-over and that final smile. It’s possible the Kid wasn’t a monster before he went in that cage—but perhaps that’s what he’s become.

How did Ruth Deaver die? A true highlight of the season was the Sissy Spacek–centered episode “The Queen,” which saw Henry’s mother traveling through time. But though we see Henry visit Ruth’s gravestone in the finale, we don’t actually see her die. Of her death, so soon after the death of the love of her life, Alan Pangborn (Scott Glenn), Thomason said: “We’re left with that final moment of her traveling through time once more, experiencing Pangborn on either side of her life and holding the chess piece.” So maybe we’ll just think of both Ruth and Alan in happier days.

Does poor Molly get a happy ending? “How do you feel about the state of Florida?” Shaw laughed. Molly escapes from Castle Rock, and that, in and of itself, is a happy ending.

Thomason explained: “In Henry, you have the prodigal son who had left and returns, and then ultimately through this very strange set of circumstances finds himself living in Castle Rock. Then you have Molly, who is his friend and chief advocate of Castle Rock. You feel at some level at the beginning of the story that she’s trying to save herself by saving the town, and seeing what good there might still be left in this place. One thing that we thought a lot about in the writers’ room was, who stays in Castle Rock and why? So I think that at some level, there is a kind of happiness—even if it’s infused with some bittersweetness—to her finally escaping and letting go.” How do we feel about Florida? Well, at least it’s not Castle Rock.

Is Castle Rock secretly a backdoor Dark Tower series? Between the potential doppelgangers (or, to use a King word, “twinners”) of Henry and The Kid and those permeable places in the fabric of the universe that King calls “thinnies” and Castle Rock calls “schismas,” some die-hard book readers might be forgiven for thinking that this is somehow a backdoor Dark Tower story. The Dark Tower series is King’s magnum opus, and begins with the book The Gunslinger, which was loosely adapted into a rather disappointing Idris Elba vehicle last year. But the Dark Tower itself—a sort of lynchpin in the King multiverse—extends beyond that one book series, and touches several of King’s other works.

When asked directly if they would consider Castle Rock a Dark Tower story, the showrunners were less evasive than usual. Shaw said: “In terms of whether it’s specifically a Dark Tower story or not, I’d put it this way: We spent a lot of time talking about the biggest, weirdest cosmologies in the Stephen King library when we were thinking about what this story was going to be. So I think that’s reasonable [to connect it to a Dark Tower story].”

But if this is somehow a roundabout journey to the Dark Tower, Thomason said they wanted to get there through the eyes of someone unused to the paranormal: “It was the operative idea behind a lot of the casting. Andre brings such gravitas and reality to all of his roles, and I think that we felt that it was it was incredibly important that Henry be taken on a journey that opens his eyes to the possibility that there are other possibilities, and that we’d really be with him through that. If Henry found himself in the pages of The Dark Tower, he probably wouldn’t have the language to articulate what he was experiencing.”

In the end, was Castle Rock Season 1 an adaptation of any one Stephen King story? Was it an adaptation at all? Both Shaw and Thomason were at a bit of a loss when it came to settling on one word to describe how they’ve translated the work of King to the screen. Is it adaptation? Remix? Shaw explained: “I think that what we were all adapting was the experience of having read and loved these books, and to try to reverse-engineer that experience for an audience.”

But now that all is said and done with Season 1, they each picked one King book that truly represented what they were hoping to convey. Shaw, who has self-described commitment issues, picked Different Seasons, a collection of four novellas that includes the classic Castle Rock-set story of “The Body” (which became the film Stand by Me), “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” (which became, you know, and Apt Pupil, which was turned into a 1998 film of the same name. Despite containing some of King’s most beloved and well-known stories, Different Seasons is surprisingly devoid of the paranormal. That fits in perfectly with Shaw and Thomason’s decision to enter the world of Castle Rock through the mundane question of a legal case, and only gradually turn up the heat on the creepy supernatural factor.

Thomason, meanwhile, picked The Stand, which is the opposite, length-wise, from Different Seasons. One of King’s most notoriously thick doorstoppers, The Stand tells the saga of a group of survivors in a plague-ridden America. It is also one of the books outside the Dark Tower series that has the most connective tissue with the larger King-verse, thanks, in part, to the presence of King’s favorite antagonist: Randall Flagg. But like Shaw, Thomason praised his book of choice for the way in which it transitions from a realistic story of an epidemic outbreak to “a supernatural genre story about darkness and light.”

So, will we see any of these Season 1 characters again in Season 2? In discussing the intentionally ambiguous ending of Season 1, Shaw noted that while he expects the audience to feel some discomfort around unresolved questions, “there’s a whole lot that we’re excited to continue to write about in the next season.” Rumor has it that Castle Rock was meant to be an anthology series, but does Shaw’s comment there mean we’ll see some of these characters we’ve met again? Thomason said:

We always viewed this as a kind of Kingian anthology. Part of the
pleasure of being a constant reader is bumping up against characters
that you’ve met before in unexpected places. We always intended
to tell a new story that has a beginning, middle, and an
end in Season 2. We’re not going to reveal what that is now, because I
think part of the pleasure of each season is not knowing exactly what
comes next. But, that said, I think that we were always very drawn to
the idea of being able to return to stories and people that we love,
but do it the Kingian way where you don’t necessarily see it coming.
Seeing Father Callahan in ‘Salem’s Lot and then again in The Dark
Tower, nobody expected it. There’s something very exciting about the
idea of having this amazing cast of characters that we’ve built, and
having the ability to come back to them, big and small, as
we go forward, while still telling a new story with new characters.
You sort of see Castle Rock and the world and Stephen King a little
differently from what we did in Season 1.

Cujo

"Of the smaller pictures, the best one is probably Cujo, with Dee Wallace." he told Deadline.

Photo: From Warner Bros./Everett Collection.

Graveyard Shift

“I guess there are a number of pictures that I feel like, a little bit like, yuck. There’s one, Graveyard Shift, that was made in the 80s. Just kind of a quick exploitation picture,” he told Deadline.

Photo: From Paramount/Everett Collection.

Firestarter

To put it bluntly, King did not like this film—in fact, he whipped out one of his most evocative insults on record for this one, calling it “flavorless . . . like cafeteria mashed potatoes.” He added, “The movie has great actors, with the exception of the lead, David Keith, who I didn’t feel was very good—my wife said that he has stupid eyes. The actors were allowed to do pretty much what they wanted to do.”

Photo: From Universal Pictures/Everett Collection.

Maximum Overdrive

But lest you think King reserves his critiques for the works of others, he did have a few choice insults for himself when it came to Maximum Overdrive, a film he directed—and later called a moron movie. In his defense, he did concede, “The problem with that film is that I was coked out of my mind all through its production, and I really didn’t know what I was doing [as the director of the film].”

It

The Shining

King famously hates Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, almost universally recognized as one of the greatest horror movies ever made. As he told the BBC in 2013: “[It’s] cold; I’m not a cold guy. I think one of the things that people relate to in my books is this warmth, there’s a reaching out and saying to the reader, ‘I want you to be a part of this.’ With Kubrick’s The Shining I felt that it was very cold. . . . Jack Torrance [Jack Nicholson], in the movie, seems crazy from the jump. . . . Shelley Duvall as Wendy is really one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film, she’s basically just there to scream and be stupid and that’s not the woman that I wrote about.”

To Rolling Stone in 2014: “In the book, there’s an actual arc where you see this guy, Jack Torrance, trying to be good, and little by little he moves over to this place where he’s crazy. And as far as I was concerned, when I saw the movie, Jack was crazy from the first scene. . . . And it’s so misogynistic. I mean, Wendy Torrance is just presented as this sort of screaming dishrag.”

To Deadline in 2016: “The Shining is a beautiful film and it looks terrific and as I’ve said before, it’s like a big, beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside it.”

Photo: From Warner Bros./Everett Collection.

Cujo

"Of the smaller pictures, the best one is probably Cujo, with Dee Wallace." he told Deadline.

From Warner Bros./Everett Collection.

Graveyard Shift

“I guess there are a number of pictures that I feel like, a little bit like, yuck. There’s one, Graveyard Shift, that was made in the 80s. Just kind of a quick exploitation picture,” he told Deadline.

From Paramount/Everett Collection.

Firestarter

To put it bluntly, King did not like this film—in fact, he whipped out one of his most evocative insults on record for this one, calling it “flavorless . . . like cafeteria mashed potatoes.” He added, “The movie has great actors, with the exception of the lead, David Keith, who I didn’t feel was very good—my wife said that he has stupid eyes. The actors were allowed to do pretty much what they wanted to do.”

From Universal Pictures/Everett Collection.

Maximum Overdrive

But lest you think King reserves his critiques for the works of others, he did have a few choice insults for himself when it came to Maximum Overdrive, a film he directed—and later called a moron movie. In his defense, he did concede, “The problem with that film is that I was coked out of my mind all through its production, and I really didn’t know what I was doing [as the director of the film].”

From Everett Collection.

The Shawshank Redemption

“I love The Shawshank Redemption and I’ve always enjoyed working with Frank [Darabont, the director]. He’s a sweet guy,” he told Deadline.

From Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection.

Stand by Me

In 2014, he told Rolling Stone it was his favorite King adaptation: “I thought it was true to the book, and because it had the emotional gradient of the story. It was moving. . . . When the movie was over, I hugged him [director Rob Reiner] because I was moved to tears, because it was so autobiographical.”

It

The Shining

King famously hates Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, almost universally recognized as one of the greatest horror movies ever made. As he told the BBC in 2013: “[It’s] cold; I’m not a cold guy. I think one of the things that people relate to in my books is this warmth, there’s a reaching out and saying to the reader, ‘I want you to be a part of this.’ With Kubrick’s The Shining I felt that it was very cold. . . . Jack Torrance [Jack Nicholson], in the movie, seems crazy from the jump. . . . Shelley Duvall as Wendy is really one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film, she’s basically just there to scream and be stupid and that’s not the woman that I wrote about.”

To Rolling Stone in 2014: “In the book, there’s an actual arc where you see this guy, Jack Torrance, trying to be good, and little by little he moves over to this place where he’s crazy. And as far as I was concerned, when I saw the movie, Jack was crazy from the first scene. . . . And it’s so misogynistic. I mean, Wendy Torrance is just presented as this sort of screaming dishrag.”

To Deadline in 2016: “The Shining is a beautiful film and it looks terrific and as I’ve said before, it’s like a big, beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside it.”